I have been teaching Zen Buddhism lately, and this year’s students are particularly drawn to a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Being Peace: “When you understand, you love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.”
Which part of a religion or philosophy students are drawn to says a lot about how they are experiencing their times, and my students’ choice of this quote makes perfect sense to me. These fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds have seen little evidence, in their conscious lives, of people who care to understand each other: to them, understanding is a crying need.
So, how do we get to the kind of understanding they are yearning for, the kind that births compassion? We return to classical Buddhist philosophy: the Four Noble Truths teach us that it is attachment to our own egoic needs (tanha) that prevents our understanding, and that there is a path—the Eightfold Path—that can help us to unravel that attachment.
So the news is good: there is a way! We focus in on one step of the Eightfold Path, Right Speech, and we try to practice it for twenty-four hours. They quickly discover that the news is also not good: if Right Speech is the easiest of the eight, and I believe it is, then the path is not an easy one to maintain.
Among other things, the culture we live and participate in is at pure cross-purposes with it. Or, as another religious tradition would have it, “The gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction...but the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life” (Mt. 7:13-14).
Will any of my students buck our cultural trend and choose the path of deep awareness and patient understanding that manifests in compassion for all?
I don’t know. But I do know that every time they consider it, every time they explore it, even for a short time, they contribute not only to their own authentic happiness, but to the health and happiness of their society as well; indeed, as Mahayana Buddhism would say, to the health and happiness of all living beings.
--The Rev. Barbara Talcott
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